Russian World War Two veterans and well-wishers sing as they gather in Gorky Park during the country’s annual Victory Day celebrations.

By Finian Cunningham

This week sees commemorations that mark the end 69 years ago of World War II. In reality, the war never ended. It continues to this day.

That may seem an oxymoron to many. Of course, it will be said, the Second World War ended in May 1945. Nazi Germany was defeated, as were other European fascist forces. Was peace not brought to Europe and henceforth decades of harmony and prosperity reigned, under the benign auspices of Pax Americana?

Well, yes, in a narrow sense the war was formally closed. But the underlying forces that engendered that war are still active today, discernible only if we debunk Western media propaganda.

This ongoing reality of conflict is because the Second World War, as with the First World War, was not merely about belligerents confined in time and space. These conflagrations were really about imperialist power conflict and hegemony whose dynamics still persist to the present day.

The Western public, inculcated with decades of brainwashing versions of history, have a particular disadvantage in coming to a proper understanding of the world wars. It is popularly understood that the Western powers, the US and Britain in particular, fought “good wars” and took a victorious stand against despotism.

There is no doubting that hundreds of thousands of ordinary American and British military men and women gave their lives in a noble effort to defeat fascism. But what of their rulers? A very different version of history has been concealed, a version that puts the Western rulers in an altogether more pernicious category from their ordinary citizens.

European fascism headed up by Nazi Germany, along with Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, was not some aberrant force that sprang from nowhere during the 1920s-1930s. The movement was a deliberate cultivation by the rulers of Anglo-American capitalism. European fascism may have been labeled “national socialism” but its root ideology was very much one opposed to overturning the fundamental capitalist order. It was an authoritarian drive to safeguard the capitalist order, which viewed genuine worker-based socialism as an enemy to be ruthlessly crushed.

This is what made European fascism so appealing to the Western capitalist ruling class in those times. In particular, Nazi Germany was viewed by the Western elite as a bulwark against possible socialist revolution inspired by the Russian revolution of 1917.